All the previews load quickly from the 1TB Samsung external SSD, then Lightroom can pull data from the Drobo only if needed. While this is much slower with its spinning hard disks, it doesn’t really affect the speed of Lightroom much, as long as you generate 1:1 previews and smart previews when importing the pictures into Lightroom. You won’t notice the difference at all.įor my 15TB of photos I use a Drobo 5Dt raid. While not nearly as fast as the internal Mac mini storage, it’s plenty fast enough to run Lightroom perfectly. I use the very reasonably priced 1TB Samsung T5 and it works very well, I get around 500mb/s read and write speeds.

With the thunderbolt ports it’s easy to get very fast external storage. For the Lightroom catalog, camera raw cache, and the generated previews you want very fast storage. The only thing I keep on the internal storage is the applications themselves which take up a small amount of space.

I do not keep my Lightroom catalog or the camera raw cache on it. I don’t worry anymore about the size of the internal SSD storage in my desktop Mac. You start to get a lot of memory pressure and swapping with only 16GB. I upgraded the unit to 32GB of ram using this kit from and it works great! You want a minimum of 16GB of ram or more to use Photoshop and Lightroom together, I’ve tested and it works best with 24-32GB of ram. The main problem I had was popping the motherboard out from the case, it really takes some force to break loose the clips so be careful! I purchased my 6 Core i7 model with the base 8GB of ram and 256 SSD. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but if you are careful and purchase the proper tools, the ifixit guide is pretty easy to follow. You can see my Geekbench scores here, this cpu is fast!Īnother great feature of the new Mac mini 2018 is the upgradable ram. Lightroom used to really kick up the fans of my iMac especially when importing or exporting images. Thanks to the new cooling system this actually runs a lot quieter than my older iMac. In fact, this is approaching the power of the new iMac Pro and blows away some of the older Mac Pro desktops. This is a high-end powerful desktop cpu that blows away the performance of the previous laptop class chips. The new 2018 Mac mini can now be configured with a 6 Core 3.2Ghz Intel Core i7 8th Generation desktop class cpu for $1299.

Lightroom mac mini